He popped the question at 7:43am this morning over breakfast at a local cafe in Derbyshire, with the help of a flash mob posing as diners.

In the moving footage, Whitbread excuses himself to the toilet before meeting an ITV producer to pick up the engagement ring.

‘Good Morning Britain’ news correspondent, Katy Rickitt, who had been posing as a waitress, tells Jackson: “Amy, I just want to warn you, you are live on Good Morning Britain and I am not really a waitress. And John has a very special question for you.”

Meanwhile, the flash mob choir breaks out into song. Whitbread then returns with the ring, and gets down on one knee.

He says: “You are my best mate, my soul mate. Will you marry me?”, to which Jackson responds: “Yes”.

Asked whether she had any clue about the proposal, Jackson tells ITV: “None at all.”

She says: “Absolutely no idea. I thought it was [the cafe’s] tenth anniversary. We were just having breakfast and chatting. Everyone got up singing, I thought, ‘oh that’s nice’ and then halfway through, I realised it was our favourite song. Then John didn’t appear and I thought, ‘what is this?’”

As for Whitbread, he describes his nerves surrounding the second proposal on the programme.

“All morning I have been trying my hardest to act normal, which is really quite hard to do…I am shaking, I have been a mess. I was so nervous, I couldn’t sleep at all,” he says.

Jackson agreed to marry Whitbread after his proposal. [Photo: ITV]

He added: “I am so grateful to have such a perfect proposal. I am overwhelmed.”

As for why Jackson ended the pair’s first engagement, she tells ITV: “I think a lot of it [in 2013] was all a bit rushed. Everything happened really quick. I think I just got cold feet, I panicked and didn’t know what to do. I just thought, ‘I can’t go through with it.

She adds: “You couldn’t write it. Our story is so special to us and we would never have ever thought this.

“When we separated, we would never have thought we would get back together, especially like this but we are so much stronger than we ever were, we know each other more, we understand each other more…things are so much different a few years on.”